The Demon Redcoat

by C. C. Finlay

  Lydia sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Proctor in the small boat. She pulled a blanket around her against the cold. Proctor felt a chill go through him that no blanket would fight off.

  Digges noticed their reaction. “That’s not all. He contended that all those infinite suns have worlds whirling about them much like our own. It sounds mad, doesn’t it?”

  “If I believed that, it would make me feel very small and insignificant,” Proctor said.

  “Ha,” Digges laughed. “If you want to feel small and insignificant, you should have such a man in your family tree, along with poets and professors, astronomers and royal governors.” He leaned back and looked at the stars again. “Actually, I take great comfort in that thought. I fear great and powerful men much less when I think that, compared with the infinity of space, we are all small and insignificant.”

  Lydia shook her head sharply in disagreement. “The human spirit is no small thing,” she said. “Every spirit burns as bright as one of them stars.”

  “Can you believe that there are an infinite number of them?” Digges asked.

  “God is infinite and eternal. If He created the stars, He could make an infinite number of them,” she replied. “In God all things are possible.”

  “Yes,” Digges answered. “That is what I tell myself when I am confronted by people with our talent. This too comes from God, even among those who use it for evil.”

  “So far our efforts to find the Covenant have been like searching for a needle in the hay field,” Proctor said.

  “Then perhaps you need a larger magnet.”

  The sail had slackened, and the boat drifted. It hit a larger wave side-on and bucked like a wagon jumping a rut. Cold spray came over the side, hitting their skin like ice. The three of them grabbed the sides of the craft to hold on, and the crew, along with Potter, jerked awake. The oldest smuggler cuffed the other men and cursed them for napping. He looked at the rudder in Digges’s hands and snatched it away. Within moments the ship had been righted, the sail filled, and they were zipping toward England once again.

  Digges crowded into a spot next to Proctor and Lydia. He leaned back and stared at the stars. “I do know someone who fights the same fight as you, who may be able to help you find that needle.”

  “Is he in London?”

  “He has been traveling across the country working to this end. But I know a place we can stay just outside London, where we will pass unnoticed until he returns.”

  “I would rather be in London, if that’s where we’ll find …” He glanced at the crew. “The other men we’re looking for.”

  “It will be safer for you outside the city,” Digges said.

  You, not us.

  Israel Potter grinned at them from his place near the bow. His high-heeled boots looked out of place among the other simple shoes in the wet bottom of the boat. Proctor did not think him simple, but he was clearly everyone’s earnest pawn. Digges smiled back at Potter, then pulled his hat down over his face and leaned back as if to sleep.

  Proctor met Lydia’s eyes and saw reflected in them the same doubts that he felt. He gave a slight jut of his head toward Digges and quirked an eyebrow. Lydia answered with a simple shrug, as if to say, What else can we do?

  What else could they do?

  Digges was hiding something from them, but he struck Proctor as a man who, despite his youth, had been hiding so many things for so long that it was second nature to him. He couldn’t help but compare him with the earnest but inept spy they’d met in New York, that poor blond boy who regretted that he but had one life to give for his country just before they hanged him. Digges was determined to hold on to his life and do something with it.

  His story about the stars was fantastic and unreal, but Proctor looked up at the moonless, cloudless sky and found that he believed it. And he found that he believed the rest of it too. Digges did oppose the Covenant, and he would introduce them to someone with the same purpose.

  Despite that belief, Proctor sat there awake until the dark shape of England rose in the west. The crash of breakers pounding on the shores matched the pounding in his head. He had been trying not to think about Deborah, but the ocean of his pulse slowly wore away the wet sand of his resistance until she stood out stark and vivid in his thoughts like bright white cliffs.

  The sun rose suddenly, as it did over the ocean, on a sea full of ships, hundreds of them, large and small, more than Proctor had seen off the shores of New York when the British landed thirty thousand troops on Long Island. British warships towered over them as they joined the fishing boats sliding in toward shore.

  Chapter 14

  Proctor was walking through the farm house looking for Deborah and Maggie. From room to room to room he went, every room empty but for ruins. The furniture was broken, the dishes were shattered, sheets and clothing torn to shreds and scattered. The new wing opened into the upstairs opened into the barn opened into the kitchen, every room the same. He screamed their names—Deborah, Maggie, Deborah—until the door he had nailed shut burst open and he entered the old wing of the house.

  He walked without moving his feet, gliding over the floor like a child sliding on the ice, until he stood in front of the old hearth. The one that Cecily had used for her black altar, the one the demon had come through seeking his child, the one he had bricked in. The place where he had last seen Magdalena standing guard.

  Magdalena had vanished. The splinters of her cane lay scattered on the floor.

  And in the hearth, the bricks were broken. The hearth stood open like a sooty mouth ringed with black and rotting teeth. The stench of smoke was everywhere, choking Proctor’s breath, and ash fell out of the air like filthy snow. Heat pressed in at him from all sides, as if he were surrounded by fire.

  His head pounded, like it had been pounding for days. It pounded like the drums of approaching legions. He had to find Deborah and Maggie and escape.

  Deborah?

  Why did his voice sound so far away? Where was she? Why didn’t she answer him?

  Deborah!

  “I’m here,” replied her voice, quiet and present, with a hint of laughter, directly behind him. He spun around, filled with relief and joy, ready to embrace her and carry her away.

  A demon stood there in her place, with heavy horns above its thick brow and a bloody smear across its scissored smile. A red coat draped over its broad shoulders, with a sword tucked in its waistband and a pistol in its taloned hand.

  “Balfri is here,” the demon mocked in Deborah’s voice. “Send forth the herald and summon the footman to do my will.”

  It opened its sooty-toothed mouth and laughed.

  Proctor jerked awake.

  Beware of D.

  D, for Deborah. D, for demon. D, for despair. Which was it?

  His head pounded, just as it had been pounding for days, only it had grown worse. To the throbbing pain had been added a sharp one, as if someone held a nail against his temple and was tapping it into place before driving it home.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  The sound was so real and present, it startled him a second time, and his heart, already racing from the nightmare, thumped faster. He looked over and saw an ash-black raven on the windowsill, tapping at the glass. He sat up on the edge of the bed.

  The raven cocked its head to one side knowingly and stared at Proctor with an eye that glittered like a poisoned gem. It leaned over and tapped at the pane again harder, tap-tap-tap, and the window nudged open. In triumph, the raven perched on its toes and bobbed along the ledge.

  “Hallo, Hallo, Hallo,” the raven said, in its mockery of a human voice. “You’re a devil, You’re a saucy devil—what’s the matter here?—You’re a devil.”

  “Grip, be a good boy, Grip,” called a voice from outside.

  The raven beat its wings against its sides, and then against the window. It hopped off the window ledge, but not before uttering a final, “You’re a devil!”

  Proctor staggered to the window and leaned o
n the frame. In the road outside the inn stood a balding simpleton. He laughed and clapped his hands like a delighted child, and the raven flapped its wings, hopping along the ground and then up into the air to alight on his shoulder. The raven croaked, and the simpleton nodded his head vigorously as if he understood.

  “Good morning, Barnaby,” Proctor called.

  “Good evening, Mister Brown,” the simpleton replied. “I do hope Grip didn’t disturb you.”

  “Not at all,” Proctor said, and he squinted at the sky. It was late afternoon. He thought about Deborah, and he wondered what time it was in Salem and what she was doing. “Take care.”

  Barnaby waved, and then strolled down the road, talking to the next person he saw. The eerie screech of the raven echoed down the street.

  “I thought I heard your voice,” Lydia said.

  Proctor turned, startled again, and saw her standing in the doorway. He sagged into a seat by the window.

  “Still not feeling well?” she asked.

  “My head won’t stop throbbing,” he said. Nothing had happened since they’d arrived in England except his headaches. “I finally fell asleep, but either dreams or Barnaby’s raven woke me. Have we heard any word from Digges? I mean, Church.”

  “The owner of the inn thinks his name is Warburton,” she answered. She folded her arms across her chest and looked out the window. “But no, nothing. He said that he was going to find Gordon, the man he was telling us about, but I don’t think he had any idea where Gordon might be.”

  Proctor had the same impression. “I think that our friend, Mister Digges Church Warburton, is a man with his fingers in an awful lot of pies. He could get distracted, and we might not see him again for weeks. London is only a dozen miles away. We can walk there and see what we can find on our own.”

  He looked out the window at the village. It stood on the edge of Epping Forest, and in many ways it reminded him of the small villages he knew in Massachusetts. There was an inn, a small plain church, a smithy, and a handful of houses. But in other ways, it wasn’t like home at all. It felt ancient, older than the oldest man he had ever known, and infirm with its age. The inn had almost as many gables as windows, all slapped on haphazardly, as if the building had grown from a shed over the centuries by slowly accreting rooms. Chimneys zigzagged from the rooftops as randomly as the additions. Outside, a thirty-foot maypole of slender ash rose higher than the rooftop, its simplicity a stark contrast with the building itself. The rest of the village matched the inn in character and style. There wasn’t a straight line anywhere: every door was lopsided, every wall leaned, every rooftop needed repair. The people of the village were bent odd by their own weight, an accumulation of misery, of death, loss, and betrayal. Digges told them that Proctor and Lydia had come from the Bahamas, and were looking for a quiet place to recover from some unspoken tragedy, and the people accepted it without question.

  He squeezed his head to stop the pounding. Darkness swam before his eyes, and his stomach rolled over and over, even though it was empty.

  “You won’t be able to walk anywhere until you get well,” Lydia said.

  “I’m not sick,” Proctor replied. “I’m just—”

  He fell forward off the chair onto his hands and knees.

  “Proctor!”

  “Stay back,” he said, panting for air. “I can stand up—”

  He fell over on his side and his temple slammed into the floor. The world around him went dark except for a single line of light, lashed at him like a whip from a distance beyond reckoning.

  He rolled over, trying to dodge the whip. But the cord slashed into him, bright and painful, winding around his soul like a windlass reeling in an anchor.

  He blindly grabbed at the floor, but though his nails scraped the joins, the smooth wood offered no serious purchase for his fingers. He could feel himself being pulled away, out of the inn and out over the green hills of England, just as he had been before, the time in Spain when Deborah tried to reach him. She hadn’t received his letter. Or she had, and she was calling for him anyway. There was a rush and desperation to this call. Despite his resistance, he flew across the ocean in a blink. Though he was only a spirit, he felt the wind and the power of the lash that reeled him in. He wrapped his hands around the cord of light, to keep it from slicing him in half, and clenched his jaw to keep from screaming in pain.

  His eyes popped open, and he was standing in the farm house. This was not the dream, this was not anything like the dream. A bad floorboard sagged beneath his feet, he smelled the bucket full of diapers by the door, and Maggie squirmed in his arms, slapping her tiny palm against the window.

  He wanted to look at her, wanted to see his daughter, but he could scarcely see a thing. It was as black as a bad night, heavy with storms. The throbbing pain in his head was gone but it had been replaced by a thick and ominous sense of fear.

  He stared out the window. He knew it was daytime, so he expected daylight, but everything was dark. Not dark like an eclipse, but dark like the sun blotted out forever. The smell of smoke was everywhere.

  That much was like his dream. He tensed, expecting the heat of invisible fires to press in on him at any second.

  A voice, muddled by distance and panic, sounded behind him and he turned. Abigail held two candles. She offered one to him.

  The candles barely lit the room. He could see the noon meal sitting uneaten on the table, a rack of diapers hung to dry beside the fire. He turned back to the window and the darkness. It made no sense. He could not even guess what was happening. It was as if the day had arrived without a sun. It felt like the end of the world was happening.

  But that wasn’t possible. The world wasn’t ending in England—it had been an ordinary spring day there.

  It wasn’t possible for the world to be ending, but it was fact.

  As he moved across the room, from window to window, from the outer door to the boarded-up door to the old house, he realized that he was with Deborah. That she had called to him and brought him to her.

  The darkness alone did not explain the level of panic he felt coursing through her blood. He wanted to reassure her. She wasn’t reaching out to him for reassurance, though. She needed help. She needed power.

  But why? He felt stretched too thin to understand, like yarn wrapped around the spindle of her spirit, pulled off a wheel the size of the world. The colors were drained from everything, and the world revealed itself in shades of charcoal, bone, and ash.

  He—she—handed Maggie to Abigail, whose face was marked by the mixture of determination and fright that seemed so characteristic of her. Then he—she—ran to the door that he had nailed shut. He saw Deborah’s small hands in front of him grab hold of the board, but he felt his strength flow through her arms as she gritted her teeth and yanked. The nails screeched as they came out of the wood, and she cast the board aside. She ran into the old part of the house and stood in front of the old hearth.

  Blood flowed through the mortar, just like the blood splattered there by Cecily when she made a black altar of it. Drums thundered from far away, echoed by the tramp of countless boots, as if legions were marching on The Farm. With each beat of the drums, the stones that blocked the fireplace shook as if they were hit by a hammer. Little pieces of mortar dust fell to the floor, leaving a thin coat of dust across the drops of blood.

  Deborah!

  He called to her, wanted to warn her, wanted to tell her to run, to flee.

  But she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hear him. Instead, he could feel her drawing on him, trying to reel him in. He felt a tingling, a tickle, running over an invisible skin stretched across the sky.

  He could see the lines of power forming as she performed her spell. They lit up the gray world like lightning illuminating the night. She drew power from the protective spell the two of them had laid together on the new hearth, flowing it through the beams and the joints of the house, running it over the paths worn by their feet in the floor. She drew on all that powe
r and patched it over the old hearth like a poultice over an open wound.

  The analogy was apt—the bleeding stopped. The stones pulsed but his masonry held. The drums continued but the tramp of marching footsteps halted.

  He—Deborah—ran back through the door, closing it behind her and barring it. When had she put a bar on it? She did another quick spell to seal it as well. She was working too fast—he was spread too thin—for him to follow her work.

  She ran back to the window.

  Outside, the dark sky churned like soup brought to boil. The sky was black with clouds, but they were no ordinary clouds—it was like smoke from a fire so vast and so distant that it rose up and blotted out the sun. He reached through the window and tried to brush the smoke away. If he could wave his arms, he could clear it away. Instead he felt it flow around him, sticking to him like a film on the back of his neck.

  Not the smoke. He didn’t feel the smoke. He felt a presence in the smoke.

  Suddenly he was back in the house again, behind Deborah’s eyes, desperately trying to reach her, to help her understand. She had to seal off the house, from the smoke and the thing hiding in it.

  Tiny flakes of ash fell from the sky like filthy snow.

  The window frames rattled, not from any wind, but from the punch of an invisible fist just like the blows that crashed the hearth. The drums intensified. The legions resumed their march.

  Abigail rocked Maggie in her arms. Oh, God, Maggie was so much bigger than he remembered. She had become this little person, and she desperately wanted her mother. She was flinging herself out of Abigail’s arms, straining to reach Deborah. Abigail clutched her tighter, her mouth set grimly as tears streamed from her eyes.

  And he was there.